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Each fall the performing arts scene starts momentum with a new season. Frankly Music jumped on that bandwagon last week in its first concert of its 15th season of high standards in chamber music, led and curated by Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Frank Almond. A large audience turned out to hear a program of music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on the lower east side. As usual, the crowd was charmed by Almond’s informal remarks about the composers and music.
This concert featured a chamber orchestra of fifteen players supporting Almond as soloist in Bach’s Concerto for Violin in A minor (BWV 1041) and Vivaldi’s ever popular The Four Seasons, a set of four violin concertos. Almond ably conducted the ensemble when needed or played along as leader. These were lively, well-played and well-balanced performances which often found a happy Baroque groove. There was a sudden change of weather late that day that made humidity a minor factor in the tuning of the instruments.
We’ve rarely, if ever, had the chance to hear MSO principal oboist Katherine Young Steele in Baroque music, which is a mainstay of her instrument. She was featured with Almond in Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe (BWV 1060R). This showed a different color in Steele’s playing, a slimmer yet still handsome sound. Steele and Almond traded melody lines back and forth with ease and grace.
On Friday evening came the rare chance to hear Symphony No. 12 by Dmitri Shostakovich, never heard previously at MSO. Yaniv Dinur, impressively conducting without score, and the orchestra made the best case possible for this 1961 symphony written to commemorate the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin. Shostakovich’s mastery of orchestral writing is always there but, politics aside, I’m just not sure this symphony adds up in the end. Vadim Gluzman gave a blazing account of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovky’s famous Violin Concerto. The tempos he took in the first and third movements were impressive, but perhaps a bit too fast, blurring definition in the intricate solo lines at times.
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